Assessing the public landscape of clinical-stage pharmaceuticals through freely available online databases

Several public databases have emerged over the past decade to enable chemo- and bio-informatics research in the field of drug development. To a naive observer, as well as many seasoned professionals, the differences among many drug databases are unclear. We assessed the availability of all pharmaceuticals with evidence of clinical testing (i.e., been in at least a Phase I clinical trial) and highlight the major differences and similarities between public databases containing clinically tested pharmaceuticals. We review a selection of the most recent and prominent databases including: ChEMBL, CRIB NME, DrugBank, DrugCentral, PubChem, repoDB, SuperDrug2 and WITHDRAWN, and found that ∼11 700 unique active pharmaceutical ingredients are available in the public domain, with evidence of clinical testing.